


turning around and around

by bebtea



Category: Zombies Run!
Genre: Chris McShell was a lovely dad, Gen, Post s5m18, i only write about grief yay, its hella rough bc I wrote it on my phone, some of this hits different in a lockdown mood, this is Veronica-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:00:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23699656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bebtea/pseuds/bebtea
Summary: “I can get her home, Five, don’t worry.”In which Veronica is better at comfort than she thinks she is. Chris was better than he thought he was too.
Relationships: Nadia Al Hanaki/Owen Landis
Comments: 8
Kudos: 12





	turning around and around

She’s not very good at comfort.

She knows almost everything about human biology, but she doesn’t know the right things to say or how long or how tight to hold someone for in a hug.

 _I’m done here,_ the loudspeaker announces petulantly, _meeting adjourned,_ and shudders silent. Veronica slides a Petri dish back into the fridge and counts backwards from twenty.

Then she runs.

* * *

The square is all but deserted, flagstones stained with blood not yet rinsed by the lashing rain. This she predicted. Kefilwe has Steve’s head in her lap, rummaging through a first aid kit, praying a little under her breath. This she also predicted. Five is sat cross-legged in front of Nadia, holding her hands, which Veronica didn’t expect at all. She didn’t even know they liked each other.

“Five, you need to move. You’re risking your position by staying here.”

Five looks up with a shot of venom, and then soften when they realise Veronica only meant well.

“You got the key, yes? Then you have to hurry.I can get her home, Five, don’t worry.”

Reluctantly, the runner nods, squeezes Nadia’s hands and gets up to help move Steve onto another stretcher. Their lip wobbles, but otherwise they are the figure of calm control. 

“Nadia?” Veronica crouches by the wheelchair. The woman doesn’t move, doesn’t look up, doesn’t stop shaking. “Nadia? It’s me, it’s Ronnie.”

Nothing. There’s a sliver of brain in her lap. Veronica looks at brains all the time of course, but the brain of a recently murdered ally is something else entirely. 

_More than an ally. Nadia’s friend. Nadia’s boyfriend._

“I know we’ve talked about me not pushing your wheelchair, but would it be okay to move you inside?”

Nothing.

“Okay, I’m going to move you out of the rain now. We’ll go back to my quarters.” Somewhere private. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere without petrified questions and pale faces.Veronica’s room is small, not much bigger than an alcove at the back of one of the labs, but it lets her spend more time there, and it lets her get some peace.

She searches Nadia’s face for affirmation, but the woman looks through her, and Veronica doesn’t really know how to lie, at least, not enough to manage _everything will be alright._

* * *

When she was very little, she’d owned a collection of music boxes. It was before science became her fixation - she must have been only three or four - and the first was inherited from an ailing grandmother.

Her mum had loved them too, if only because she’d finally found something that made the serious, dark eyes of her little girl light up. Her dad joined in with them: he loved to collect things. He brought home more and more from charity shops and jumble sales and antique parlours and, under her watchful stare, would gently remove the caked on dust and line them up in perfect rows on her shelves. Veronica could spend hours winding them up and polishing them with her pyjama sleeve and looking at the women dance in the starlight flooding from her little window, until either of her exasperated parents poked a head round the door and asked her to _please go to bed sweetheart, it’s gone midnight._

One day, rushing up to her room to find a book, she’d knocked one from its place. She’d sat down, and carefully wound it up, and opened it, but the notes were discordant, the woman’s face bent and broken and grotesque.

 _Don’t scream, sweet, we can fix it._ But the damage was done.

She asked her dad to box them away the next week, and stacked her shiny new textbooks in their place.

* * *

The wheelchair is heavy, and Veronica struggles with it through the muddy mess the quad is rapidly turning into. There’s a mounting, buzzing frustration in the back of her head, an itch that won’t go away. All the fear and anger and sadness that she’s been burying for months is bubbling up in the pit of her chest and she just wants to dive into lab reports to think of something else, but it’s taking all of her strength to struggle forward and push, and this has to be done before Ian decides to come back or God knows what will happen to them then.

Huh. She’s not one for thinking _God knows,_ but Ian’s so unhinged there are too many variables to contemplate. Might as well leave them to a higher power.

She doesn’t have the words and she doesn’t do hugs, but she finds a stack of dry clothes, a clean headscarf, a hunk of bread and cheese, a ration pack. She makes tea with four spoonfuls of honey for the shock. She waits.

If Nadia would just cry, maybe then Veronica would know what to do. It’s the staring, the disconcerting staring, like part of her has died, like there’s nothing left inside to even comprehend it. It’s stupid, it doesn’t make any sense, but… Nadia looks just like a zombie.

She sits on her bed, drinking her own cup of tea, starting to notice the symptoms of her own shock. It seems funny that her hands are shaking so hard. She thinks of the time all those scientists got infected in one of her labs, the panic attack she had after, Nadia holding on to her tight and promising to never let go, never blame her. She thinks of a time when she got a B in a French exam, the first and last B of her life, and her mother buying her an ice cream, and her father sitting down to go through the mistakes with her. It feels, like all things pre-apocalypse, like a dream. A life that was lived by someone else. 

_“I know it matters to you, but you’re so much more than the clever girl. You care. You care about things being solved, about making things better. You don’t always have to get everything right.”_

Then, Veronica thinks of something. There’s a tiny metal box, hidden in the toe of her spare boot, that hidden at the bottom of her nest of blankets. She pulls it out, gently opening the catch with her thumb. One of the things Five grabbed from her old house. She hasn’t opened it, hasn’t wanted to, the dread of seeing the crushed and broken figure inside too much to bear.

The little dancer has been glued together, the cracks no more than hairline, the spring straightened. There’s a note in her father’s barely legible scrawl that makes her breath catch in her lungs.

_There’s nothing so broken it can’t be fixed :)_

She winds it up with hot eyes, and places the box in Nadia’s palms, and they listen to the music play, and the rain cascades on the metal roof above.

* * *

“Ronnie.” At last.

“Yes?”

“You’re the last thing left, okay? The last thing left. You’re not allowed to let anything happen to you.”

“I won’t. It’s… it’s good. To hear your voice. It’s...”

“Promise me.” The woman’s voice wobbles. “Promise me you’ll stay alive, because I can’t take any more of this.”

“Nadia.” She turns, her face very serious. “I’m going to live forever.”

There’s a moment of silence, before the two of them burst out laughing, tears running down their faces.


End file.
